another crisis averted by airbrain woman

Cue the Happy Celebration Carnival Music –  I found the mysterious vanishing file! Complete with a copy of the student’s score report stating that he had indeed finally passed the Praxis I -so I did not admit him to teacher ed with failing scores. What a relief. It occurred to me right before I left yesterday that I’d never checked the Inactive files. And – ta da!! There it was. Complete with INACTIVE!! scrawled across his name in bright red ink. Why? Well, that remains a mystery, as there did not appear to be any reason at all to make his file inactive and scrawl to INACTIVE!!! across it in red ink, but WHATEVER. It’s here, he passed, I’m not going to be to blame for us getting written up by the state department of education.

Whew.

And so far I’ve not caught the Plague. Keep your fingers crossed. As I keep mine washed and slathered in antibacterial gel.

And now there’s another crisis is looming on the horizon, but this one I can’t do much about. Our university is changing over to a new computer system. This change has actually been going on for several years now. Instead of switching everything over at once, they’ve done it bit by bit. Finance has already gone live, as has Human Resources. Now it’s finally our turn. "Our" as in everyone who uses the student information system – the old bulky awkward non-user-friendly annoying system I’m always whining about. So I’ve been kind of excited about that. Despite the doom-and-gloom predictions from my officemate K, who hates hates hates change and who has said all along that it will be a complete disaster. They’ve had some glitches with the already-live systems, but this one is the biggie – the one that involves everything having to do with students.

Well, today I went to training. I was already a little worried, since it was only for two hours and didn’t involve computers. Not hands-on. For a system that we use constantly and intensively. It turns out this was more of an information session by the Registrar’s office, which is the office responsible for this segment of the switch. That in itself scares me. Let’s just say I know how they operate. How the guy in charge operates.

So they talk about the timelines and they talk about how we have to be live by August and they talk about how hard they’ve all worked to get ready for this and they talk about how we will get lots more training (we will be training ourselves actually – by going online at our "leisure" and going through the training things, which will certainly be no problem around here with our lack of distractions and all – but I digress) and they talk about all the problems people fear we will have and they talk about how the current system will be mostly shut down on Friday and we won’t be able to enter data again and we’ll just email their office with anything we need entered after Friday….

And I am sitting there thinking …wait – what???!!!??? And then I think, okay. Okay, I KNOW I misheard that. Of course I misheard that. They could not possibly cut off our access to the current system six months before we go live! HAHAHAHAHA!!! That’s really funny! That would be complete lunacy!

Ummmm… no. I did not mishear that. Starting Friday, which, yes, IS the day after tomorrow, they will be shutting down most of our system so that we can no longer enter data. Which we do pretty much constantly. But their office will do it for us! They don’t really have a clue as to what exactly we – or anyone else on campus – actually DO, but if we’ll write down all the screens we use in the student information system, they’ll figure out a template for us to give them the information to enter whatever of the ten gazillion bits of information we’re needing to have entered! No problem!

So, yeah, I have to sit there trying to think of every single thing I do and every single screen I have access to, and of course I don’t know what exactly K or anyone else in our office needs because we do different things. I’m sure  asking us to bring a list WITH us would have made too much sense.

And I was in  the second of maybe eight training sessions. There are groups next week and the week after. So they are cutting off our access before they have a fraction of the people who use the system in a training session. And I VERY nearly didn’t go this morning, because K was going with me and something came up and she called to reschedule n and if they’d called her back before I had to leave I was just going to reschedule too for when she was going. So we would have just been completely blindsided on Friday!

When I came back from the training with this shocking news, the associate dean nearly had a heart attack. And dashed to her office to call the guy who is in charge of all this. He told her that that he’s going to send around an email about it – we wouldn’t be completely blindsided! I haven’t gotten it yet so I guess he’s sending it tomorrow. That’s a whole day’s notice – that should be plenty!

Why am I not surprised? I am deciding to be amused. Because there is not a thing we can do about this. If the registrar’s office can’t get what we need entered – like admission to the program, which has deadlines and needs to be done fast – well, it’s just not my problem! It has nothing at all to do with our office. And actually it will mean that the registrar’s office gets to do quite a bit of my work for me – that’s a good thing! And it’s not just us – it’s everyone on campus who works with students. I don’t think they have the slightest idea what they have gotten into. Apparently they’ve rehired several retired registrar’s office workers to do the data entry. Maybe it won’t be a disaster. But, if it is, oh well!  Whatever!

Stay tuned. This should provide PLENTY of crazed entry fodder.